How To Structure A Winery Website

Wineries are similar to other websites in the structuring of content. For effective SEO, you need to have a separate page for each type of content. However, they differ from other websites because of the important SEO requirement to avoid duplicate content. Read on …..

KEYWORDS

Keywords are an essential first task for any new website. All other marketing efforts hinge on how good are your keywords. You need to identify which keywords bring the most traffic and also have the best chance of ranking the site. These are what we call the focus keywords – each page needs to have a different one of its own. The focus keyword needs to be used 3 times in the text body with once being bold, once being italic and once being underlined.
Push the “focus” keyword to the front of Titles and text. In the example above the focus keyword would be “Merlot”
Have a different Title Tag for each page – don’t re-use the same one over and over. Its good to vary the keyword slightly – it may be a different word sequence or another keyword phrase altogether.
It would be advisable to compare your strategy with a competitor website and see what you need to do to compete effectively.

CHECK COMPETITOR KEYWORDS

I use the software Rank Tracker to identify competitor keywords and develop the correct effective SEO strategy. This software can compare your top 10 competitors and the difficulty of ranking for any particular keyword. It is a brilliant piece of software.

A PAGE FOR EACH TYPE OF CONTENT

A Page for each type of wine with the SEO focused on keywords related to that
are customized to that page only. Keywords should include things like grape variety, year, wine name, any awards, etc
Use region and brand names in the Title Tag eg Merlot – Bellarine Peninsula – Bellarine Estate – 2014

LOCAL SEARCH PRESENCE

Google now has become so powerful it serves up the results of searches customized to suit the locality you are in (Facebook is doing the same). So it has become important that you are fully registered locally with Google+, Yelp, Foursquare, Groupon, Facebook Places.

WHAT YOU NEED TO INCLUDE

• Claim your Google Places listing – fill out the profile and include a photo.

• Physical Address of your Business in your nominated city . If you are unsure of your location then go to Google Adwords and go into Campaign Settings where you can enter Location and choose your town.

• Your business name is best if you include the city and state eg Grapelovers Pty Ltd, Wine Store, Geelong, Vic.

• Your IP should match that of your physical registered business address.

• Google Places categorizes businesses – as well as you can , match up your top keywords with the pre-set categories.

• Citations are a part of your website authority ranking. This means links form other websites – two important ones are yelp.com and citysearch.com. Also links from the Internet Yellow Pages.
You will get back-links from blogging and maybe newspaper articles but these are know as “unstructured” citations.

• Links From High Authority websites to your stongest ranking page create Page Rank and Website Authority. Although this is more important for your general organic traffic.

• Quality of Inbound Links (Back-links) This is an important factor.

• Check that the phone number listed on the website matches the one which gets crawled.